Rend Wastes Barbarian Speed Farming Variation

The Wastes Rend Barbarian deals with Normal Rift farming excellently, its relaxing and smooth playstyle makes it very suitable for the purpose. We have solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.

Within the limited scope of regular difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Furious Charge Merciless Assault Whirlwind Wind Shear 1 Rend Bloodbath 2 Sprint Marathon 3 Battle Rage Ferocity 4 Wrath of the Berserker Insanity
Passive Skills
Berserker Rage Rampage Pound of Flesh Boon of Bul-Kathos

When you are speed farming regular rifts, parts of your playstyle will adapt to the lowered challenge and focus more on speed and utility.

A large part of your rotation will remain the same during speed farming; you will still spend the majority of your time Whirlwinding left and right, which applies Rends through the Ambo's Pride legendary power. On the buff side, you apply Wrath of the Berserker on cooldown and still keep Battle Rage active at all times, but you will add a mobility layer on top by chaining Sprint activations as well. You will be using Furious Charge Merciless Assault as an instant charge from one enemy pack to the next, as well as a trigger for Band of Might (if you choose to maintain it during speed farming).

Parts of the skill and passive selection will overlap with the base Greater Rift progression build, but others will have to change according to the task at hand. Ability to cross over great distances faster and more efficiently take precedence.

• Whirlwind Wind Shear is maintained from the progression build, as it will still be responsible for the application of Rend Bloodbath (also retained) through the Ambo's Pride legendary power.
• Wrath of the Berserker Insanity is an omnipresent self-buff in both versions of the build.
• Battle Rage stays in the build from the GR progression spec, but swaps runes from the healing-oriented Swords to Ploughshares to the extra movement speed of Ferocity.
• The duo of enemy displacement skills from the progression build — Ancient Spear Rage Flip and Ground Stomp Wrenching Smash — will give way to two mobility skills, Sprint Marathon and Furious Charge Merciless Assault. Note that if you choose to drop Band of Might from your setup, you can slot Ignore Pain Bravado in the place of Furious Charge with similar success.
• Rampage, Berserker Rage and Boon of Bul-Kathos will be a solid, damage-oriented foundation of your passive selection.
• You can change the flexible fourth passive slot from progression staples like Ruthless to the globe-consuming movement buff of Pound of Flesh to further speed up your clears.

Most of the gear from the Greater Rift progression build will still make sense for speed farming, but a few variations will be necessary in order to maximize your productivity and momentum during regular Rift clears.

The speed farming variant of the Wastes Rend Barbarian still utilizes the 6-piece powers of the Wastes set, but a useful alteration you can make is to drop Tasset of the Wastes in favor of Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan, of course cubing Ring of Royal Grandeur in the process. These legendary pants make resource management in this constantly moving build a breeze, as well as adding a smattering of damage to your overall Rend burst.

Lamentation is kept in the speed farming variant, as it contributes too much to the Rend playstyle to be dropped.

In your jewelry, the recommended setup shifts away from the steady trickle of cooldown reduction of Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac and the timing-based damage bonuses of Convention of Elements. Early on in character progression, or if you prefer a simpler setup to play with in general, you can play with a setup of Avarice Band and a Band of Might. Avarice Band is an Act 3 cache legendary ring that increases your gold and health globe pickup radius as you pick up gold, stacking to the massive, half-screen circle of 30 yards — all for a generous 10 second duration. Its legendary power will greatly assist you in maintaining the movespeed bonuses of Boon of the Hoarder, as well as Pound of Flesh. The Band of Might is there to provide you with its incomparable damage reduction bonuses, triggered via Furious Charge in a speed farming setup.

If you want to hyper-optimize your speed farming performance, you can alter the second ring slot to Rechel's Ring of Larceny for its Fear-based speed proc, which takes advantage of the guaranteed Fear-on-hit roll of a worn Echoing Fury.

During speedfarming, where the multiple runes of Wrath of the Berserker that come from Mortick's Brace are overkill in many regards, the preferred bracers become Warzechian Armguards, for the environment destruction speed buffs that are easily provided by the AoE of this build. The former favorites, the elite spawning Nemesis Bracers, are still very valuable, but they can now be equipped on the follower while still getting their bonus via the Emanate mechanics. You should still equip them in groups, where you cannot have a follower with you. The Nemesis Bracers value comes from the additional loot — not to mention progression — coming from the extra elite spawns. They let you finish standard rifts that much faster, and acquire the coveted GR keys in greater amounts.

Finally, the Istvan's Paired Blades set will be too defensive for the limited challenges of standard Rifts. You have two solid options for the weapons during speed farming. In a simpler, more straightforward setup, you can use the Bul-Kathos's Oath set — Bul-Kathos's Warrior Blood and Bul-Kathos's Solemn Vow — for their combination of convenient Fury generation and Movement Speed bonuses. If you want to hyper-optimize your speed farming however (at the cost of a slightly more demanding gearing), your weapon slots will be best taken by Ambo's Pride (leaving space in the Cube for speedrun-oriented powers) and Echoing Fury (mostly for its Movement Speed bonuses from the Frenzy buff).

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

This Season comes with the theme of Angelic Crucibles — consumable items that empower Legendary items with perfected Ancient-level stats, as well as infuse them with one of three unique, powerful, class-specific abilities at random. For this build, we recommend aiming for the Whirlwind Sanctification, which adds the following power to your build:

• Whirlwind Sanctification: Whirlwind pulls in and holds all enemies within 25 yards.

Use Angelic Crucibles on an item that crosses over most (if not all) variants of a build, and is also an item that is relatively harder to perfect than other slots (since sanctifying an item maximizes its stats). In the case of this build, a good candidate for Sanctification is the omnipresent Lamentation belt, or the (hard-to-perfect) Pauldrons of the Wastes shoulder.

You can read more on Angelic Crucibles and the sanctification process in our dedicated Angelic Crucible Mechanics guide.

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised and re-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — For virtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual to advanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the path outlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of life first, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive and edge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary Potion Powers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separate resource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Set items of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, and in the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powers in our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

Taeguk remains a universally desired damage and defense amplification gem for channeling-based builds.

You will be using Wreath of Lightning as a replacement of Bane of the Trapped strictly for its level 25 property — a sizable movement speed bonus (in fact, you can stop leveling the gem right then and there). Note that you can (and should) utilize Bane of the Trapped for as long as you feel the need for its damage multiplier, and only transition to Wreath of Lightning when you comfortably overpower the content.

Boon of the Hoarder is a great speed farming inclusion, as it increases both your gold income (necessary for empowering GRs) as well as your movement speed.

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

In the easier, initial setup you will match the weapon Cube slot to the progression build, using Ambo's Pride for its crucial Rend bonuses while wielding the Bul-Kathos set. In an optimized setup where you wield Ambo's and Echoing Fury, you will be using Messerschmidt's Reaver in this slot for its CDR-per-kill powers, which offer a speedfarm-appropriate counterpart to the more GR-oriented Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac. You can also alternate to In-geom in this slot, and see which one fits your playstyle better. The goal of both is to provide you with a Wrath of the Berserker reset as soon as possible, ideally overlapping.

Goldwrap is a speedfarming staple which renders you near-invulnerable as you pick up gold; it offers tremendous synergy with the triumvirate of Avarice Band and Boon of the Hoarder.

In the more traditional setup, this slot should be taken by your weakest roll of the three jewelry recommendations — Avarice Band, Band of Might of Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac (if you go according to the table above for example, you would cube ORotZ). If you go for the hyper-optimization route with worn Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan, you will need to complete the Wastes 6-piece bonuses with a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

The recommended follower for this build during standard rift farming for keys is the Enchantress due to her numerous utility bonuses, allowing you to smooth out your speed runs even further.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

Waller affixes are problematic for Rend Barb builds, since they greatly limit your opportunities to weave and DoT from one pack to the next, back and forth, which is the general playstyle of the build. As such, our general recommendation for your legendary potion — especially for standard Rifts, where threats are significantly lower — is the Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid, which allows you to break through Waller affixes.